I’m impressed how fast people on HN switched from “Apple is terrible for not dropping lightning cables for USB-C!” to “Apple is terrible for dropping lightning cables for USB-C!” Talk about a zero-downtime migration!
The backlash is mystifying though. MacBooks, iPads, and Beats had been shipping with USB-C for years, a standard Apple was heavily involved in creating in the first place. Most other manufacturers had already standardized on it. Unless you lived in a very strange bubble of only interacting with iPhones and air pods, you already dealt with USB-C devices. For those very few people in that very limited bubble, the problem was fixed by replacing a single cable. It was a mountain of controversy for a figurative molehill.
It’s wasteful because it contains a chip to verify the cable’s fee was payed to Apple. They’re small but there are a lot of them and they are uneccessary and annoying when they fail and you can’t charge your device.
USB-C is still mechanically inferior. Lightning feels better to use and lasts longer. It always clicks, it’s always snug, it lasts forever. I wish Apple wasn’t so greedy and made it an open standard. Maybe now we would have better connectors on all of our devices.
The point is that if Apple switched to USB-C in 2016, the same time they only put Thunderbolt ports on MacBooks, we would be looking at much fewer lightning cables. Even if as late as 2020 when almost every android phone is using USB-C, that's still better than iPhone 15 from 2023.
The backlash is mystifying though. MacBooks, iPads, and Beats had been shipping with USB-C for years, a standard Apple was heavily involved in creating in the first place. Most other manufacturers had already standardized on it. Unless you lived in a very strange bubble of only interacting with iPhones and air pods, you already dealt with USB-C devices. For those very few people in that very limited bubble, the problem was fixed by replacing a single cable. It was a mountain of controversy for a figurative molehill.